Two UC San Diego Professors Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

They join 218 other distinguished scientists, scholars, writers, civic leaders and businessmen in the 2012 class, which will be inducted at a ceremony Oct. 6, 2012 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Ferro-Novick, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, studies how vesicles move and function within cells. Vesicles are sacs of membrane that carry cargo between organelles within a cell. Specifically, Ferro-Novick and colleagues are interested in how vesicles and organelles maintain their identity amid a constant flow of intracellular traffic. Her basic research is relevant to human disease. For example, a bone formation disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia tardia results from a mutation in a gene that encodes a subunit of a large multisubunit complex identified in the Ferro-Novick lab. This complex mediates several different trafficking events in the cell.

Levine is co-director of the UC San Diego Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. His work examines the physics of nonequilibrium processes, especially in the emergence of spatial patterns in extended systems, and covers issues arising in condensed matter physics, chemical physics and most recently biophysics.

The 232-year-old American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, celebrating the contributions of members to science and technology, energy and global security, social policy, culture, humanities and education. The 2012 class includes James Drunckman, who developed influential theories of how citizens form political opinions; U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Robert P. Colwell, chief architect of Intel’s Pentium microprocessors; actor Clint Eastwood; Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos; recording artist Paul McCartney; composer Andre Previn; and philanthropist Melinda F. Gates.

Historical members include George Washington, Daniel Webster, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill. Current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.